Grimes, a.k.a. Claire Boucher, appears on the latest episode of the “Song Exploder” podcast, a must-listen for music fans who want to hear their fave artists talk about how they created their own songs. In it, Grimes breaks down her thrashing Art Angels cut “Kill V. Maim,” revealing the impetus of it was a friend who doubted her ability to be musically aggressive.
“He kept doing these cute little plucky things, and I was like ‘No, no, let’s make a hard song.’ He was like ‘No, no, you make cute music.’ I was so horrified,” Grimes recalls. “So I went home after that sort of wanting to prove that I could make something that’s going to be really aggressive that I would want to play during an action sequence in a movie.”
After that, she set out to make something that could soundtrack the trailer for a fictional crossover of The Godfather and Twilight. Add in a lot of kick drums, some cleverly buried samples of cheering crowds, and what Grimes calls a “scary, demon chorus” inspired by Harley Quinn, and you have “Kill V. Maim,” which she reveals is “probably my favorite song I’ve ever made.”
1-2-3-4
Walkin' like a man
Hitting like a hammer
She's a juvenile scam
Never was a quitter
Tasted like a raindrop
She's got the look
In my mind there's a face
On my lips there's a name
In my life there's no place
For the man that I love
Cause I'm livin' my life
Just to sing and be free
The city lights are often blurred
By stories we've already heard
Booze and drugs now break my head
Cause all the shining stars are dead
I sometimes close my tired eyes
Look at myself, be hypnotized
Findin' a reason of lovin' you
The man I thought was meant for me
But were you really meant for me?
Kindness in your eyes
I guess you heard me cry
You smiled at me like Jesus to a child
I'm blessed I know
Heaven sent and heaven stole
You smiled at me like Jesus to a child
And what have I learned from all this pain
I thought I never feel the same about anyone or anything again
But now I know
In a concert in Brazil one night, he spotted “a really cute guy” in the crowd, and “he was so distracting I actually avoided that end of the stage.” But afterwards Anselmo Felleppa, the Brazillian dress-designer face-from-the-crowd, came to George’s dressing room - and changed his life. “It’s very hard to be proud of your sexuality when it hasn’t given you any joy,” he says, “but once you have found somebody you really love... it’s not so tough.” Anselmo “broke down my Victorian restraint, and really showed me how to live, how to relax, how to enjoy life.” It was his first slow, tender sexual relationship with a man, he explains: “I was shagging around but I had so little experience with men that my sex life was so ridiculously inadequate for me, right until I met Anselmo really.” But it was more than that: “He was the first person I had ever loved, and I discovered he loved me too.” Even now, there is a hint of quiet incredulity in his voice.
But then - six months into their relationship - Anselmo discovered his blood was infected with the HIV virus. The sour grief that gripped George gave him - he winces at the irony - one of the best performances of his career, when he played the Freddy Mercury Tribute Concert as Anselmo began to die. “Can you try to imagine being any lonelier than that?” he asks. “Try to imagine that you fought with own sexuality to the point that you’ve lost half of your twenties. And you’ve finally found a real love, and six months in it’s devastated. In 1991 it was really terrifying news. I thought I could have the disease too. I couldn’t go through it with my family because I didn’t know how to share it with them - they didn’t even know I was gay. I couldn’t tell my closest friends, because Anselmo didn’t want me to. So I’m standing on stage, paying tribute to one of my childhood idols who died of that disease... the isolation was just crazy.”
The day after Anselmo’s brain haemorrhaged away, a stricken, incoherent George finally told his parents he was gay. “They didn’t even know he existed. The thing that really killed my mum was the idea that I had gone through that without anybody,” he says. While George’s life had always been shot through with depression - “it runs in my family, I’m sure it’s genetic” - it was only now, in the early 1990s, that he descended into “a deep black hole” he thought he would never escape. He made the classic depressive’s mistake of trying to warm himself with cannabis and ecstasy. His mother’s sudden death from cancer floored him, and “it got to a point where I was smoking 25 joints a day”.
Jane Moore's 2004 GQ interview goes into more detail, quoting Michael's fears that Feleppa did not seek the best possible treatment for his infection because he feared the negative publicity. Feleppa died, far from Michael, when Michael was scarcely 30. I can barely imagine.
I swear I remember mentions of the press of Michael having something to do with Feleppa at the time of the release of "Jesus to a Child", even mentioning how this was a tribute to the man without mentioning the significance of the man. The significance of the song, though, is clear: Michael was paying tribute to the man he loved, the man who aved him and the man whose loss prostrated him. Of all the early music groups active in the first half of the 1990s, only the Pet Shop Boys come close to this, in their faintly elegiac cover of "Go West" or their powerful "Being Boring". Their approaches, though real and definitely meaningful, were more oblique than Michael's.
What else can I do but congratulate him? Michael mattered.
Make a space
For my body
Dig a hole
Push the sides apart
This is what
I'm controlling
It's a mold
The inside that I carve
This will be my monument
This will be a beacon when
I'm gone
Gone, gone
When I'm gone
Gone, gone
When I'm gone
Whatever happens, I'll leave it all to chance
Another heartache - another failed romance, on and on
Does anybody know what we are living for?
I guess I'm learning
I must be warmer now
I'll soon be turning, round the corner now
Outside the dawn is breaking
But inside in the dark I'm aching to be free!
Generations will come and go
but there’s one thing for sure
Music is our life’s foundation
and shall succeed all the nations to come
I hope it’s gonna be alright
'cause the music plays forever
(For it goes on and on and on and on…)
I hope it’s gonna be alright
(On and on and on…)
‘Cause the music plays forever
(For it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on)
In the early 1980s, Leonard Cohen sat on the floor of a New York hotel room, wearing only his underwear and remembered “banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’”
He had been working on it for years.
Cohen, who died Thursday at 82, was many things: poet, writer and monk, among them. But the Canadian-born artist spent most of his career as a musician, one of the most influential songwriters of the past six decades.
During that career, he wrote many gorgeous songs, which he sang in his smooth, smoky basso. But, as every obituary written about the man (including The Washington Post’s) has led with, he attained fame with the song he was attempting to write in that hotel room, the song for which he wrote more than 80 verses before trimming down to five, the song whose third line reads, ironically, “You don’t really care for music, do you?”
The song is “Hallelujah,” which appeared on his 1985 record “Various Positions.”
I try to discover
A little something to make me sweeter
Oh baby refrain from breaking my heart
I'm so in love with you
I'll be forever blue
That you give me no reason
Why you're making me work so hard
The early synthesizer experiments, with Royalle’s sultry voice flickering in and out of the mix, foreshadowed Cowley’s prescient disco music to come, fusing euphoric vocals with a synthesized pulse to reach massive, almost unbearable peaks. His epic 16-minute “megamix” of I Feel Love, which managed the seemingly impossible feat of improving on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s original track, and upbeat tracks like Menergy and Megatron Man became instant classics.
“I think we knew we had something special, even way back then,” says Hedges. “The music was pop sounding, but definitely with an artistic edge to it. People were going nuts for it, in England, especially … the Pet Shop Boys were quoted in the press several times that Patrick Cowley influenced their music, which you can hear in this electronic pop music.”
The music also hails back to a different, more freewheeling time in San Francisco. Longtime San Francisco resident Rob Bregoff, who knew Cowley, remembers paying $235 to rent a three-bedroom apartment in the Haight district in the 1970s. Split between room-mates, that meant each person paid less than $100 – a far cry from the tech industry-fueled San Francisco of today, which now holds the dubious distinction of the highest rents in the US. “It was a time when everything was forced out into the open,” says Bregoff. “All social mores were being questioned.”
As the 1970s progressed, Trocadero Transfer and Dreamland in SoMA, I-Beam in Haight-Ashbury, and the City disco in North Beach – all gone now – became key spots for disco. “When the Trocadero Transfer opened and got their all-night permit, it ushered in a New York-style all-night party in San Francisco in a club – a regular club that was open every weekend and around the clock,” says Steve Fabus, who DJed at the Trocadero in the late 1970s and 1980s, and at the nearby Endup.
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